Ignore fields from Java object dynamically while sending as JSON from Spring MVC

Can I do it dynamically?

Create view class:

public class View {
    static class Public { }
    static class ExtendedPublic extends Public { }
    static class Internal extends ExtendedPublic { }
}

Annotate you model

@Document
public class User {

    @Id
    @JsonView(View.Public.class)
    private String id;

    @JsonView(View.Internal.class)
    private String email;

    @JsonView(View.Public.class)
    private String name;

    @JsonView(View.Public.class)
    private Instant createdAt = Instant.now();
    // getters/setters
}

Specify the view class in your controller

@RequestMapping("/user/{email}")
public class UserController {

    private final UserRepository userRepository;

    @Autowired
    UserController(UserRepository userRepository) {
        this.userRepository = userRepository;
    }

    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET)
    @JsonView(View.Internal.class)
    public @ResponseBody Optional<User> get(@PathVariable String email) {
        return userRepository.findByEmail(email);
    }

}

Data example:

{"id":"5aa2496df863482dc4da2067","name":"test","createdAt":"2018-03-10T09:35:31.050353800Z"}

UPD: keep in mind that it's not best practice to use entity in response. Better use different DTO for each case and fill them using modelmapper

Add the @JsonIgnoreProperties("fieldname") annotation to your POJO.

Or you can use @JsonIgnore before the name of the field you want to ignore while deserializing JSON. Example:

@JsonIgnore
@JsonProperty(value = "user_password")
public String getUserPassword() {
    return userPassword;
}

GitHub example

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but I actually ran into this as well a few months back. All of the available solutions weren't very appealing to me (mixins? ugh!), so I ended up creating a new library to make this process cleaner. It's available here if anyone would like to try it out: https://github.com/monitorjbl/spring-json-view.

The basic usage is pretty simple, you use the JsonView object in your controller methods like so:

import com.monitorjbl.json.JsonView;
import static com.monitorjbl.json.Match.match;

@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/myObject")
@ResponseBody
public void getMyObjects() {
    //get a list of the objects
    List<MyObject> list = myObjectService.list();

    //exclude expensive field
    JsonView.with(list).onClass(MyObject.class, match().exclude("contains"));
}

You can also use it outside of Spring:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.module.SimpleModule;
import static com.monitorjbl.json.Match.match;

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
SimpleModule module = new SimpleModule();
module.addSerializer(JsonView.class, new JsonViewSerializer());
mapper.registerModule(module);

mapper.writeValueAsString(JsonView.with(list)
      .onClass(MyObject.class, match()
        .exclude("contains"))
      .onClass(MySmallObject.class, match()
        .exclude("id"));

Yes, you can specify which fields are serialized as JSON response and which to ignore. This is what you need to do to implement Dynamically ignore properties.

1) First, you need to add @JsonFilter from com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonFilter on your entity class as.

import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonFilter;

@JsonFilter("SomeBeanFilter")
public class SomeBean {

  private String field1;

  private String field2;

  private String field3;

  // getters/setters
}

2) Then in your controller, you have to add create the MappingJacksonValue object and set filters on it and in the end, you have to return this object.

import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;

import org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonValue;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ser.FilterProvider;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ser.impl.SimpleBeanPropertyFilter;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ser.impl.SimpleFilterProvider;

@RestController
public class FilteringController {

  // Here i want to ignore all properties except field1,field2.
  @GetMapping("/ignoreProperties")
  public MappingJacksonValue retrieveSomeBean() {
    SomeBean someBean = new SomeBean("value1", "value2", "value3");

    SimpleBeanPropertyFilter filter = SimpleBeanPropertyFilter.filterOutAllExcept("field1", "field2");

    FilterProvider filters = new SimpleFilterProvider().addFilter("SomeBeanFilter", filter);

    MappingJacksonValue mapping = new MappingJacksonValue(someBean);

    mapping.setFilters(filters);

    return mapping;
  }
}

This is what you will get in response:

{
  field1:"value1",
  field2:"value2"
}

instead of this:

{
  field1:"value1",
  field2:"value2",
  field3:"value3"
}

Here you can see it ignores other properties(field3 in this case) in response except for property field1 and field2.

Hope this helps.